re:

by Sacramento Dave

Aug. 18, 2012 10:46 am

A personal friend recently sent an Email to me via GMail saying that she could help me apply for social security disability coverage, if I wished. When I opened her GMail, the border columns of the gmail page were full of advertisements from Health Insurance Companies who cater to retirees, and advertisements from Law Firms who process Social Security Disability Claims. I was shocked that the advertisements were aimed at the content of my private email. I have never researched Social Security Disability Benefits on line, nor have I discussed that subject in a post or chatted about it anyone on line before. Google read my email and tailored the ads to open when I read it. Google is spying on my personal communications and it is a blatant invasion of my right to privacy.

Gmail is trying hard to collect everyone's private cell phone numbers for GPS tracking so they can both tailor advertising and use GPS tracking informatation to update their live traffic flow information on Google Maps. They request me to provide them with a cell phone number every time I sign on to GMail.

Where can I sign up? I would like to make a list and collect some money for everyone I don't get along with, (Like they do in Afghanistan and Western Pakistan.) Only over there, if your name is on someone's blood money - hate list, you may end up being sent to Guantanamo or even worse, you can have your home and extended family zapped, pulverized and splattered by some trigger happy kid with a joy stick, remotely controlling a guided-missile-equipped-toy-drone-airplane from his day job at a military base arcade in Nevada. (And who said " War Ain't Fun ! " ?

I use Yahoo mail with a good spam filter. I Run a privacy cookies dump daily, and a registry cleanup weekly. I like the Amazon prompts, and they always say with the book or product " because you looked at xyz" You might be able to use a third party agregator mail program that draws all your e-mail accounts to on site, I don't know. I dabbled with Thunderbird a few years ago, a Mozilla free source mail product.

I am an expat and a few years ago in conversation to my brother back in the states I mentioned taxes, and soon after I got audited by the IRS. Probably a coincidence, and it was under W, and I vote D, register D, and not high income. A few years earlier I had derogatory data scrubbed from my record at my Embassy. INS local in US couldn't do it. There is a citizen with my name different race that I was confused with. Sunscreen might have had a tangential benefit for my travels before that.

Yeah, I may be dumping my Android Smartphone for this same reason. They have a very nice OS but they are in bed with Google all the way and it seems like every friggin preloaded google ap on there wants to track my every move. It's too bad, too. Google offers a lot of great services but I am unwilling to let them pry into my life to gain access.

I also don't think this has anything to do with the Patriot Act. This is a private company. They have been allowed to do this the whole time. Unfortunately, the draw back to having an unregulated internet is that it is unregulated in every way. This allows freedom of information flow but also crap like this to happen all the time.

The private use of this information is a cover story, and a thank you to the comapnies that have created the vehicles for the spying.

You can dump your phone, or change services, but it will not help. Until spying on us is made illegal, consider everything you say and write, and every website you visit to be 'evidence' of your guilt.

The patriot act created this game, and the companies that play along and collect billions of targets are allowed to become rich off it.

Right you are.

If that son of a bitch George W. Bush had not blown up the World Trade Center we would not have the Patriot Act of 2001, and the 98 Senators and 357 house representatives that votes YEA could have stayed home that day.

Google probably didn't "read" the email but your sender may have an account with one of their ad services and those got embedded in the email. That's how those ad services work. Sorry Dave, you're just not important enough for Google to read your email. <grin>

To understand Google you need to understand their mindset in that they feel they are running a race to stay ahead of the pack. I don't think they have sufficient and experienced enough management to keep their developers out of trouble so they make grievous errors. Some folks complain that their YouTube number changes (go lower) and that is probably because of a bug. They actually have statistical bugs with Android app sales and frequently post notices to us developers that they are aware of the bug and working on a fix.

Google reflects a little different and new paradigm in the business world since it produces a lot of open source than anyone can freely use. Their revenue center is through ads as well as licensing for Google API devices at $50 per device. Manufacturers can use the Android API for free and that is why you see these sub $100 Android tablets in your local stores. The plus about open source is you get magnitudes more engineer eyes on the code than even the biggest companies could ever afford. It is a very clever thing.

Apple is far more arrogant and questionable in behavior than Google. And lets not even get started with the now in decline Microsoft. The problem with big corporations is they wind up with people who feel they want to rule the world with them.

You need to know this... Support for Donald Trump's campaign is still growing nationally, and in early primary states, but he's not just gaining support in early primary states. A new poll from Florida shows that Trump is leading Jeb by 6 percentage points - and he's leading Rubio by 16 points.